Gendun Chophel

His Early Life

Gendun Chophel was born in 1903 in Sholphang in Rebkong, Amdo. At the age of fourteen, after having learnt to read and write from his father, he entered the local Drisha Monastery. Three years later, he enrolled into the 2,500 monk-strong Labrang Tashi Kyil Monastery. Since a small child, GC had proven himself to be something of a prodigy, reciting long and complex liturgical texts after hearing them only once.

By the time Gendun Chophel was in Labrang he had earned for himself the reputation of a master debater; his specialty was in defending positions that in traditional parlance would have resulted in sure and ruinous defeat: once he took up the Jain position, rejected by Buddhists, that plants have consciousness and not one monk in the courtyard could prove him wrong. In the film, his friend recounts how GC unfailingly beat his opponents through such tradition-bending eloquence and wit that his every religious battle inevitably ended with the witnessing monks erupting in rambunctious laughter: “Ho, ho, ho!”

Gendun Chophel’s unorthodoxy was revealed early on even in such benign act as reading from a scripture. Once, during a routine recitation in the monastery’s chamber where some hundreds of monks were reading from portions of the Buddha’s 108-volume cannon, their individual incantations riding, crashing and disappearing in the over-arching deafening boom, GC was to be observed in a corner reading his text silently, intently.

If he was known for his brilliance, he stood out also for his searing criticisms of the time-honored monastic curriculum. And so in 1926, GC was forced to leave the Labrang Monastery; in one version Lopez cites the reason to be GC’s fondness for making mechanical toys. Of his expulsion, he writes bitterly in one poem:
Alas! After I had gone elsewhere
Some lamas who can explain nothing
Said that Nechung, king of deeds
Did not permit me to stay due to my excessive pride

Rather than expelling to distant mountain passes, valleys,
And towns
One who takes pride in studying the textbooks of Rva and Bse
Would it not be better to expel to another place
Those who take pride in selling meat, beer, and smoke?
In 1927, after a four month-long journey across vast steppes and salt lakes in the company of a large caravan, Gendun Chophel arrived in Lhasa. There he joined Drepung Monastery’s Gomang College and was put under the charge of Geshe Sherab Gyatso, a leading Gelug scholar of the day. The teacher-disciple relation was to soon become strained; as he had done before, GC showed little restraint in shredding the doctrines inherent in the monastic texts and he was not the one to shy away from arguing with his teacher even. Frequently the two were interlocked in shouting matches; exasperated, Sherab Gyatso refused to address his student by name, calling him instead “the madman.” (The title of Lopez’s book derives its cue from this exchange)

GC soon dropped out from the classes. But he was frequently to be seen in the debating courtyard, confounding his opponents, challenging the best minds, sometimes in disguises, like for instance that of an illiterate Dobdob, that subgroup of burly monks who in the Western Hip Hop culture would have translated into club bouncers: big of biceps, sparse of words, generous with jabs. It is incredible for a wiry man whose nickname it was Drisha Skinny, while at his fist monastery, that he could take on such a formidable appearance; a testament to his chameleon streak indeed.

Around that time, Gendun Chophel pursued his another interest: painting. Not long after, he was making a comfortable living drawing thankgas, boasting of, among his patrons, such stellar names as Phabonga, a leading Gelug lama. Among few of his illustrations that survive today are portraitures of photographic realism, a far cry from the conventional painting style, which capture in black and white shades this aristocrat and that lama, a selected few who could afford to be immortalized on paper by the brushstrokes of this most unique monk-artist.
Just months shy from obtaining his Geshe Lharampa degree, GC left Drepung.

Gendun Chophel’s wanderlust had been fueled early on during his encounters at Labrang with an American missionary, Marion Griebenow, and his family, from whom he may have learnt some English, and about steam engines and airplanes. But it was in 1934, after he had met Rahula Sankrityanan, a forty year-old Indian scholar and freedom fighter, which GC was finally to realize his dreams of journeys into distant India and Ceylon, where he was to remain for the next twelve years. While in Tibet, the two worked on an ambitious project to salvage rare Sanskrit scriptures from monasteries of southern Tibet, an experience that led GC to lament the disastrous face of Tibetan superstition as observed in the ways in which local believers pocketed away such text leafs to stuff their amulets and adorn their altars.

Tibetan Buddhism’s traditional school curriculums made of its students wonderful debaters of copious memory, at times good investigators into truths adept at Samadhi, but it instilled in them little inspiration to write, to contribute in a literary sense. That impetus, lacking in the certainty of his traditional setting, GC was to find in the shifting sea of his physical wandering; his being equally seized by languages, words, letters, native as well as foreign, as by what his eyes saw and his mind perceived: about self as well as about others.

His Literature

Apart from his occasional dabbling in poetry, Gendun Chophel wrote little in Tibet. By the time he returned from India twelve years later, he had authored a staggering number of works: a travelogue, an unfinished history book, an erotica literature, a pilgrimage guidebook; also an English translation of a Tibetan tome on history of Buddhism, Tibetan translations of Indian classics like Shakuntala, Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, and the Pali Theravadin cannon, Dhammapada; numerous Tibetan newspaper articles and essays in English for one Mahabodhi Society Journal. His muse, in short, hit him bad when he was on the road.

It could be that in the cosmopolitan Rahul Sankrityayan, who looked to India’s tradition as a source for the revitalization of Indian national consciousness, Gendun Chophel had found a brethren; and in the new country he set foot in, with its classical tradition which had newly attracted a Western scholastic attention and which had become a subject of robust reinvention by local nationalists, GC found the creative grounds which had eluded him thus far. As Tsering Shakya writes, “(Gendun Chophel’s) own growing interest in the sources of Tibetan Buddhist tradition and history would have led him to find the India of that period exciting and inspiring.”

In coming from Tibet to India in 1937, which the Tibetans looked to as Aryabhumi, land of the Buddha, Gendun Chophel had exchanged one milieu for another, both tied together by a history of spiritual and cultural intercourse, but one that had little bearing on real contemporary terms. And so midway into learning Sanskrit in Lhasa thinking it to be the spoken language in India, GC had to quickly switch to struggling with English when told by Rahul that Sanskrit had long ago disappeared from regular conversations.

Gendun Chophel’s most important work by his own estimation is his travel journal, The Golden Surface, the story of a Cosmopolitan’s Pilgrimage, his longest too, which in the course of some 611 pages, only half of them now surviving, dwells upon such subjects as geographical description of India; the origin of its name; customs of its peoples; identification of flowers and trees and how to recognize them; the edicts of King Ashoka as found on stone inscriptions; a general history of India with emphasis on the Gupta and the Pala dynasties; as well as history of Sri Lanka and the religions of non-Buddhists: Hindu, Muslim Islam and Theosophy.

In India, Gendun Chophel took up with Maha Bodhi Society, an international Buddhist missionary organization, which made it possible for him to later visit Ceylon, to learn there about Theravada monks and their philosophy, to write for their journal in English, and to author a Guide to Holy Places in India, which many describe as the first example of modern Tibetan literature and which the society first helped publish. As could be expected, this book, both in style and in content, diverged sharply from the traditional pilgrimage guides: Lamyig, a genre in itself in Tibetan literature associated mostly with reincarnated lamas.

If anything, GC’s book, sprinkled with findings by British archeologists, its narrative more conversational than didactic, dispelled much of the erroneous facts that had shaped the Tibetan view of India and its many pilgrimage sites; In the Portrait of the Dalai lama, Charles Bell, then British Political officer who became a close friend of the Great Thirteenth, remembers: “The most striking admission of ignorance came when he asked me, ‘Where is Bengal? We read this and other such names in our books but we do not know where these countries are’.”

While earlier chroniclers had made their guide books a stage for displays of miraculous sightings and fantastical stories, Gendun Chophel kept it simple and practical: the book, while being a truthful account of a curious mind, carries such useful details as railway network, train connection points, breakdown of costs; complete with instructions on procuring maps and deciding on what to eat and where to sleep.

The Earth is Round

GC also wrote articles and essays for The Tibet Mirror, the only newspaper for Tibetan-speaking world produced from Kalimpong by Tharchin Babu, another Tibetan exposed to Western values and knowledge. He wrote about events that were unfolding in the greater world, about Hitler and the rise of Nazis, about Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle, about airplanes, steam engine and modern science.

And when in 1938, as Lopez writes, “Hitler annexed Austria; Otto Hahn produced the first nuclear fission of uranium; Howard Hughes, flying a twin-engine Lockheed, set a new record for the circumvention of the globe; color television was first demonstrated; the first Xerox image was produced,” when the first Superman episode appeared in Action Comics, in that same year, GC was attempting to prove to his countrymen that the world was not flat.

He wrote detailed articles to that effect, complete with globe illustrations, latitude and longitude and all. Once, GC’s former teacher Geshe Sherab Gyatso passed through Calcutta on his way to China, and found himself exposed to his former student’s critical questioning: “Is the earth flat or round?” When the Geshe defended traditional cosmology according to Buddhist scriptures, GC dismissed him with these words: “Not even a dog, let alone a man will visit you in China if you talk like that!” On this score at least, GC was wrong: the Geshe later went on to assume important positions in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

In one of his articles, GC put forth an argument that U med, or cursive Tibetan script, had evolved from U chen, or block script, challenging a widely-held belief that the two systems had been founded separately on another ancient Indian script and Sanskrit respectively. And so he lived out a role that, as Tsering Shayka notes, was also a burden assumed by modern literary innovations in most societies, “whether the new form has emerged as the organic product of changes in a society or as a result of the impact of colonial rule.” In one poem, GC writes:

I have written facts
Unheard of in the Land of Snows.
Because of my poor and ragged appearance
No one is there to heed my words.

By 1938, much had happened inside Tibet. The 13 th Dalai Lama, who had ushered in a period of de facto independence having wrested it from the inept Qing dynasty and which triggered off events that while placing his country on the cusp of modernity rendered it vulnerable to internal intrigues and open struggles at the highest echelon, had passed away. In his place had been enthroned a 14 th Dalai Lama, now three years old, who was sitting over a nation that was drawing further back into its insularity, making it little prepared for the coming Communist Chinese onslaught. Around that time, in his travel book and his articles, GC was to forewarn about the horrors of colonialism:

“It is generally the case that in every kind of worldly custom, the intelligence of Europeans is superior to ours in a thousand ways. They could easily spin the heads of the peoples of the East and the South, who, honest but naïve, had no experience of anything other than their own countries. And thus they came to many lands, large and small, accompanied by their armies. Their hearts were filled with only self-interest. The timid peoples……were caught like sheep and taken to the (foreigners’) own countries. With feet and hands shackled in irons and given only enough food to wet their mouths, they were made to perform the most difficult work until they died. …… From Africa alone the people thus captured numbered more than one million, and uncountable numbers of the unusable were put in huge boats and abandoned at sea.”

An Unfinished History

GC’s most famous work is probably his White Annals, an unfinished history of Tibet that for once relied more on documented evidences culled from archival chambers than on half-myths and half-truths of the Tibetan Buddhist version that all but blurred the real picture of the country’s past. As Hugh Richardson, British India’s political officer during the 14 th Dalai Lama’s time, notes, the book “was the direct result of his discovery during travels abroad that Western scholars possessed evidence about the early history of Tibet which was unknown to his contemporaries.”

GC’s White Annals was, in that sense, a more accomplished history book than the later History of Tibet by Shakabpa, which in its predictable discourse, in the rigidity of its worldview, differed little from biographies of earlier important lamas. And it formed the impetus for the modern sensibility which contemporary exile scholars like Dawa Norbu, Tsering Shakya and Jamyang Norbu employ in reconstructing our past, in defining our present. So much so that in GC’s use of Tibetan manuscripts salvaged from Dunhuang caves in China some twenty years earlier, which described the might of Tibet’s imperial dynasties, one can see the seeds for the excellent doctorate thesis Dawa Norbu wrote and which he reproduced toward the end of his book Tibet: The Road Ahead.

In the poem that opens his historical work, GC wrote:
Through compiling the available ancient writings
That set forth dates in a manner certain and clear
I have generated a small degree of courage
To measure the dominion and power of the first Tibetan
Kingdom.
The Tibetan army of red-faced bloodthirsty demons,
Who pledged their lives with growing courage to
The command of the wrathful Hayagriva
Are said to have conquered two thirds of the circle of the
Earth.

Around that time GC struck a friendship with Russian Tibetologist, George Roerich, the son of famed artist and poet, Nicholas Roerich, who had taken up residence in Manali in India; and with him the Tibetan monk collaborated on an English translation of the monumental history on Buddhism in Tibet, written some five centuries earlier, called the Blue Annals. It is also likely that around then GC came into contact with modern styles and tempo in paintings, which he incorporated into the skilled strokes of his own paintbrush, thus stretching the expanse of his genius, making him as much of an artist as a scholar and a poet.

The poet in GC had been at work from very early days. But while his poetry written in the Labrang followed formalistic conventions and exaggerated tones, his later works were to reflect a sentiment more personalized than practiced, a way of expressing both subtle and sophisticated, its narrative venturing so far as to incorporate the use of colloquial language. He also wrote poems in English; Heather Stoddard in her biography comments that in “his English poems the influence of nineteenth century English Romantics is noticeable in the vocabulary and style”. In his essays and his poetry, GC championed social reforms and criticized his people’s blind superstition, as evident in a poem widely quoted even today:

All that is old is proclaimed as the work of gods
All that is new conjured by the devil
Wonders are thought to be bad omens
This is the tradition of the land of the Dharma.

Like in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, particularly his Love in the Time of Cholera and Memories of My Melancholic Whores, in which his protagonists straddle the deceptive grounds of lust and love, seeking a life with which to reflect their art, the sex more often than not paid for, so too it seems GC spent his Calcutta days in utter lasciviousness, a part of him looking for that experience with which to flesh out his Treatise on Passion, a book inspired by Kamasutra.

In lyrical prose, his erotic manual, translated by Jeffrey Hopkins into English as Tibetan Arts of Love: Sex, Orgasm and Spiritual Healings, details the subtle nuances and multifarious aspects of kissing, biting, touching, scratching, penetrating, the types of foreplays and after, with such knowingness that it would have left bewildered even the most notorious layman out on his nightly expedition of climbing onto a rooftop and slipping into an unsuspecting woman’s sheepskin blanket, missionary style. As GC writes:

With small shame for myself and great faith in women
I am the kind who chooses evil and abandons good.
For some time I have not had the vows in my head
But recently I stopped the pretense in my bowels.

The book’s instructions on heightened sexual pleasure finds its subtext in the spiritual aspirations of Tantric Buddhism’s sixty-four arts of love, which seek to generate through orgasm a more subtle and powerful level of consciousness; in the mad rush of orgasm, in its finality, one is revealed, subconsciously, the dynamism of spiritual path. Treatise was the only second such manual to appear in the history of Tibetan literature, the first having been composed by the famous Nyingma scholar, MiPham. Making a point of difference between the two works, GC continues:

The venerable Mipham wrote from what he studied
The promiscuous Chophel wrote from what he experienced
The difference in the power of their blessings
Will be understood when a passionate man and woman put
Them into practice.

Going Back to the Roots

Gendun Chophel’s writings, as most commentators observe, are marked by two recurring elements: bitterness and poignancy. In describing the land of Aryans to his audience back home, much of his breath was wasted in undoing misconceptions bordering on fanaticism; in talking about the roundness of the earth, he was charged with rebelling against Buddha’s words; in reclaiming the militaristic glory of his nation’s past, before Tibetan Buddhism mind-shepherded an entire populace to eschew its defense instincts, he risked humiliating his very history. For a writer, he was in a worst place possible. For the community of his readers, disapproval came more naturally than praise, ridicule than respect.

But then paradoxically, as Tsering Shakya says, “What is noteworthy about Gendun Chophel’s work is that his interests were primarily confined to the examination and exploration of his own cultural tradition. Despite the fact that he had acquired a good knowledge of English and was able to compose poems and write articles in that language, there is no evidence that he showed much interest in Western literature. Gendun Chophel’s interest lay in the sources of his own tradition rather than in a search for new fields, just as his studies of Sanskrit and Pali were a part of his research into the original sources of the Tibetan canon. His focus on authenticity and on the roots of Tibetan culture to some degree shows an element of nationalist thought, of an effort to construct a new understanding of the past.”

And so it is fitting that his last known work, also most explosive, was his most elemental, a journey to the very beginning: a treatise about that most authoritative tenet of Tibetan Buddhism, Nagarjuna’s philosophy of Middle Way. It is said Gendun Chophel wrote a core part of this text and the rest he dictated to one of his disciples, a Nyingma monk, which added another dimension to the resulting controversy. Some accounts say GC dictated parts of this book in a series of drunken slur; one anecdote has it that GC, while completely inebriated once, laid out with incredible lucidity the interpretation of Madhyamaka.

The Adornment was written either before Gendun Chophel was put in prison in 1946, or after he was released three years later in 1949. It immediately sparked a controversy that is yet to subside even to this day, provoking refutations from the best minds of Gelug scholasticism, among them a close Geshe colleague of Trijang Rinpoche: their attacks targeting not only GC’s philosophy, but his intelligence, his integrity even.

The man, if anything, was a true man of the letters. When he returned to Tibet, after his twelve years abroad, a bulk of his belongings comprised of several boxes of notes, some scribbled on cigarette wrappers. As GC’s monk companion remarks in the film, Angry Monk, “he would always be writing something. Even at a train station, surrounded by the bustle and chaos of all that went by, he would be looking at things, people, and then jotting something down on a paper.” The boxes had disappeared from his house when Gendun Chophel was released; some say the Lhasa government had handed them over to the British counterpart, perhaps as a token of thanks for turning in a man suspected of involvement with Russian Communist expansionists.

The creative and controversial Tibetan intellectual Amdo Gendun Chophel (1903-1951)
composed his guide to India during the 1930's while visitting many of the
ancient sites of Indian Buddhism, which had only recently been the object of
archaeological rediscovery and modern religious revival.

His work offered traditionally minded pilgrims from the remote Tibetan
highlands clear instructions on the correct identification of authentic
Buddhist sites, as well as unique practical guide for using the Indian rail
system. The Guide to India is one of the first works of Modern Tibetan Literature
and was to become the most used manual contemporary Tibetan pilgrimage.

Tibetan Arts of Love

Synopsis:
A Karma Sutra in the Tibetan tradition, containing the classic Indian 64
arts of love and the sexual methods for attaining bliss, harmony, love
and joy. It also gives the methods of increasing the experience of bliss
and emptiness for yogis who are meditating according to the two highest
tantras.

The book includes a complete translation of the Treatise on Passion by
the highly controversial Gedun Chopel, as well as an account of his
fascinating life story. An over-arching focus is placed on sexual ecstasy
as a door to spiritual experience of fundamental mind; the sky experience
of the mind of clear light pervades the scintillating descriptions of
erotic acts.

Synopsis:
An English translation of the classic verses on the Dharma set side by
side with the Tibetan text. The outstanding Tibetan scholar Gedun Chophel
translated this classic work from the Pali into Tibetan, and here it has
been translated into English by the staff of Dharma Publishing with the
Tibetan text alongside.

Poems by Gedun Choephel

Manasarovar

In the times now long
forgotten
In the night of other ages,
When things were not as they now are
Lay the earth a lifeless body,
Cold and hard and all unyielding,

Like a maid in dreamless
slumber,
Untouched by life’s budding springmood,
Ere the glow of sun light calls her.
And the sky looked down and saw her.
Gently then in stealth descending,
In the rose of early twilight
Stooped and kissed her in her slumber.
And behold her young heart heaving,
Throbbed her pulse, her eyelids opened
And those eyes, all filled with wonder
Shed the hot tears of her being.
Thus was born this lake Himalayan,
Mother of the holy Ganga.

II

Mountain-wave, mystic
and dreamy,
By thy shore does stand a maiden
And the rhythm of thy water
Blends into her burning bosom,
Stands she motionless and gazing,
Knows not where her flocks are staying.

The young hunter aims
his arrow,
And, behold, he sees thy water,
And no more sees he the roebuck
Slacks the bowstring, flees the quarry.

When the sun is golden
glory
Sheds his aureole o’er thy surface, -
Standst thou like the shrine Campaca
But the white dreamrays of moon-light
Veils thee in a garb of silver,
In the rope of Milarepa.

Rebkong

My feet are wandering neath
the alien star,
My native land, - the road is far and long.
Yet the same light of Venus and Mars
Falls on the small green valley of Rebkong.

Rebkong, - I left thee
and my heart behind,
My boyhood’s dusty plays, - in far Tibet.
Karma, that restless stallion made of wind,
In tossing me; where will it land me yet?

Like autumn cloud I
float, soon, there, soon here,
I know not what the fleeting moons may bring.
Here in this land of roses, fair Kashmir,
My years are closing around me like a ring.

Fate sternly sits at
Destiny’s hard loom
And irrevoked her tangled pattern weaves
The winds are blowing around my father’s tomb
And I but dream of those still summer eves,
When - child - I listened to my mother’s voice,
Whose stories made my youthful heart rejoice.

So far, so far I may not
see those graves.
Ah, friend, these separation pangs are sore.
My heart is thrown upon the ocean waves
Where shall at last reach a peaceful shore?

Oh Where?

A city there is which
lone does stand
In ruins mid bamboo trees
Hot blows the burning desert sand
Where dry shrubs sigh on thirsting land,
Where monkeys cry, and with these
Joins the shrill cry of the jungle cock
Where a maiden drives her scattered flock
To the tunes of the ancient lay.
Where an ox cart moves on its lazy way
Ad the halts for shade b’neath a jutting rock;
Oh, City, where is the day,
When on thy golden Throne sat Kings
Who held the Sceptre high in this place?